Articles published
in
September 2014

How much of your character learning is done through communication? It should be a significant part, but I think this is very rare, both inside and outside classrooms. This article is about using communication to make character writing more fun, meaningful and effective.

Communicating is the essence of languages and the goal of language learning. In this article, I discuss bot the merits of focusing on communication, but I also explain why focusing too much on communication isn’t the best way of learning.

I have spent a lot of time writing about learning Chinese recently, but most of the text hasn’t ended up on Hacking Chinese (yet). This is because I’m writing a book, but it’s also because I’ve published a bunch of articles on other websites. In this article, I introduce and link to everything I’ve published elsewhere before August.

Attitude is one of the key factors when learning a language as well as for life in general. This article is about how a change of perspective can turn negative situations into learning opportunities and become a happier person overall.

Hacking Chinese Resources now features over 250 resources for learning Chinese, all tagged, sorted and introduced properly so they are easy to find for learners and teachers alike. I need your help spreading the word, submitting more resources and voting on those already posted!

This article is built on a survey of readers’ study time and shows clearly that counting study time in years is completely bunk. It also shows that most people greatly overestimate how much they actually study.

Have you even found yourself grading your answer slightly more positively than you should? Even though we all know that we shouldn’t, I think this is quite common. We shouldn’t do this! We’re only cheating ourselves and impeding our progress. In this article, I talk a little about cheating, spaced repetition software and some related consequences and theories.